Madness behind Milligan's magic

The drama is played out in a white-walled Muswell Hill psychiatric ward where Milligan has ended up after his umpteenth breakdown

And so the old jokers keep bouncing back. Round The Horne is still being revisited with a third version at The Venue, a lesser Peter Cook is currently holding court at Hampstead's New End and now writer Roy Smiles's artful exploration of the madness of comedy king Spike Milligan transfers from the West Yorkshire Playhouse and gets the balance between patter and pathos just about right.

Ying Tong's director Michael Kingsbury also dusted off Round The Horne, but this is a considerably more ambitious affair, attempting to ask questions about the thin membrane between comedy and mental instability.

The drama, set as the Fifties swung into the Sixties, is played out in a white-walled Muswell Hill psychiatric ward where Milligan has ended up after his umpteenth breakdown.

His colleagues, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, want him to hammer out more Goons scripts, but the pressure proves too much.

Wartime shell shock holed Milligan's mind below the water line and he is taunted by nightmarish flashbacks and surreal hallucinations. Sellers and Secombe appear as leprechauns. BBC announcer Wallace Greenslade is a Jewish one, a leprecohen perhaps. His team-mates then return as Mr Bumble from Oliver! and a Dr Strangelove Nazi.

Laughs ripple gently through Kingsbury's episodic production, which never lets us forget the sanity-destroying horror of Milligan's military experiences.

There is an intriguing idea that his wisecracking creativity may even have kept the inevitable demons away. "Do you always use jokes to deflect pain?" asks his shrink. "Only for 40 years."

The cast is uniformly strong, with Christian Patterson outstanding as the big-hearted Secombe, a carefree nut with a fondness for blowing raspberries.

The stiff-lipped Jeremy Child, who could moonlight as Prince Charles's stunt double, works his socks off as Greenslade and various other supporting characters. Peter Temple is far too svelte for Sellers, but captures his vocal range nicely, as well as his ambitious eye on Hollywood.

If there is a slight chink in the show's armour it is that James Clyde's Milligan is too foppishly handsome to convey his agonising mood swings. Great comedians are invariably grotesques, and, apart from trying to kill Sellers with a potato peeler and intermittently going into bug-eyed turmoil, he frequently appears more grumpy than manic depressive.

At the end we still do not know exactly what made the godfather of modern comedy tick, but Milligan is a pertinent reminder of the paradox - maybe more yin yang than ying tong - that great humour often comes out of despair rather than delight.

You don't need to know about the original series to appreciate the story, either. Comedy fans of all generations will get something out of this voyage around the dark side of the Goon.